5 Facts about eating healthy that are completely false!

Eating is essential, you need to eat to stay healthy and alive. The human has been eating since its very first day on the planet, you would think that by now, we would how to eat in the best way possible. Sadly, not the case. It is hard enough to figure out how to eat clean, so we look up tips and tricks to do so. But don’t be fooled by the following tips that supposedly help you lose weight but they don’t.

1. Diet soda helps you lose weight

The actual sugar in the sodas are replaced by artificial sweeteners such as aspartame. There aren’t many people who like the taste of it but since we humans are weak, we need to have our soda and if we’re trying to lose weight they are the logical answer. Scientists have noticed that people who replace the natural sugary drinks by the diet alternative don’t lose any weight. It depends how each person’s body processes sugar. The diet beverage tricks your pancreas into thinking that when drinking it you get a load of sugar in you, which you obviously don’t. This results in your pancreas cranking up the insulin amount of your body.

This has two consequences for it:

A) Your body will absorb more sugar than usual from other foods you eat

B) Your body will crave more food, because you got it excited by promising it will receive a sugar overload and it gets cockblocked with counterfeit sugar instead Conclusion: you might think you’re helping your diet but you’re not!

2. Sugar causes diabetes

A lot of people will be surprised by the fact that if you get diagnosed with diabetes he or she will no tell you to stop eating candy bars. Why? Because just as a runny nose is a symptom of having a cold, high blood sugar is a symptom of diabetes, not a cause. Diabetes comes from your pancreas becoming too lazy to get up and produce enough insulin, the hormone responsible for delivering sugar to your cells. So why the common idea that eating sugar causes diabetes? Well, people who eat an abnormally large amount of sugar probably tend to eat an abnormally large amount of … just … everything, and being overweight is a definite factor in developing Type 2 diabetes. When you eat too much – even too much healthy food (yes that is possible) – you can exhaust your pancreas, preventing it from producing enough insulin to deliver all that extra glucose you consume to your body's cells. So your pancreas doesn’t want to try anymore, your blood glucose levels rise. Of course, that's just Type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes usually develops in childhood or young adulthood and also has nothing to do with eating too much sugar – it's just a matter of your number coming up in the genetic lottery.

3. Eating at night makes you fat

The myth says that our level of fatness is entirely determined by calories taken in versus calories burned. Sleeping usually isn't a very physically intensive activity, so when you make out with snacks right before bed, you won't be using up any of those calories unless your night terrors are really strenuous that week. So clearly, eating at night is a true dieting no-no.

The reality is that according to a study conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, you're actually better off loading up in at night than other times of the day. It has to do with how your body regulates when you get hungry.

The study split a big group of police officers and split them in two different groups. The first group ate a heavy carb-loaded meal at night and second groups ate their carbs spread out through the day. According to what we initially believe, the outcome of the study should be quite logic: the group that ate donuts for dinner should have blown up so big they would have trouble getting into their car after the six-month study. The opposite happened, not only had those officers not gained any weight they had lost more weight than the second group. The reason for this is that the heavy intake of carbs in the evening changed the participants' secretion of hunger hormones in a way that they felt less hungry throughout the day, with just a single hunger peak in the evening (aka it’s time for donuts!). The research suggests that “concentrating carbohydrate intake in the evening, especially for people at risk of developing diabetes or cardiovascular disease due to obesity” could be an effective alternative for people who have difficulty sticking with diets.

4. Eating a lot of really small meals boosts your metabolism

Hold your breath, because what you are going to read now might come as a slap in the face. You know that buff, sometimes annoying, fitness guy the gym, the one who's constantly raving about how you have to eat mini-meals? Yeah, it turns out he’s right.

Studies from as early as the 1950s have praised mini-meals as the ultimate weight-loss tool. But those studies were full of flaws and not accurately described for them to be efficient. Why? Because people who lived by this study didn't control their calorie intake. And when it comes to weight loss, the total number of calories you get in your body is what truly matters, not when or how often you do. So the people who lost weight with a variety of smaller meals did it because, for whatever reason, eating more often made them eat less. And if eating more but smaller works to make you less hungry, just do it, managing hunger is what successful diets are all about.

5. The food pyramid is the bible of healthy eating habits

The pyramid isn’t base on scientific evidence or research. The problem was that the pyramid wasn't based on scientific evidence or research – it was more about which lobbyists whined loud enough to get their particular product shuffled to a more prominent spot on the chart.

According to the pyramid, all fat is bad. The extra stupid part of this is that in 1992 (when the pyramid was released), we'd known for 30 to 40 years that it's not fat itself that's bad – it's that some fats are bad.

Yet the Food Pyramid asks you to eat 11 servings a day of carbohydrates so that you can avoid fat at all costs. The kicker is that they counted potatoes as vegetables, so add in up to five servings of those bad boys and you're up to 16 servings a day of starchy, carby deliciousness.

But it wasn't just the wheat and potato farmers who wanted in on this. The dairy industry wanted their cut, even though dairy isn't a dietary requirement. Beef? Sure, there's a nice T-bone in there, right alongside other protein sources such as legumes, assuring you that three servings of steak a day is perfectly healthy. So avoid all fats, but a cheeseburger is the perfect meal.